Earthworm Migration

Do earthworms migrate? Good question. Okay, not as pressing (for some) as to whether we should reward the people who bungled us into this current financial crises with $700 billion or some lesser amount, but an important question nonetheless.
I’ll have to ask our naturalist buddy, Wendy. One takeaway lesson you always get when hiking with Wendy is to look down as much as you look up. (For more about earthworms and virtually everything else outside the four walls of you life, check out www.naturenuts.com.)
I was minding my own, and the rest of Nature’s business this morning, hiking the Old Carriage Trail in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I watched a scene straight out of JJ Audubon, or maybe Robert Bateman) as a family of four Pileated Woodpeckers hammered and chatted away on a backlit tree. I helped several Carolina Wrens, Blackcapped Chickadees and their associated Tuffted Titmouse friends make enough noise to wake an owl or whatever was in the bush that had them all upset. I never saw the reason for their pique. They all took off and I assume it was a snake.
After a couple miles on the trail I turned uphill and realized there was a herd (I don’t know what else to call it) of either big earthworms or small night crawlers) heading downhill. Hundreds. I bobbed and weaved and tried not to step on any of the slow movers. It was a shady spot on the trail. The ground was so dry it had cracked in spots.
Now my basic instinct as a fisher told me to grab as many of these critters as possible. Then I remembered I was a fly fisher, often a dry-fly fisher, and live-bait fishing was a thing I was suppose to disparage. But these were really nice, juicy looking worms …
I posted myself behind a tree to see if any of the birds in the forest were interested. No takers. So what in the world, at least this part of the world, were these worms doing?
Another unanswered question and one of the reasons we keep going back into the woods.